Catalyst_ A Tale of the Barque Cats - Anne McCaffrey [103]
The cats were free of the lab, but how would they escape the roof? Jubal had no idea. Earlier Sosi had asked, “Can cats count? Do you think the skinny cat—”
“Pshaw-Ra,” Jubal said. “That’s his name.”
She’d wrinkled her nose. “Funny name. Do you think he has room in his little ship for all of the kitties? Maybe once we get the shuttle out?”
“I think if we packed his ship and the shuttle both with all these cats, there’d be no room to navigate and nothing to breathe or eat. I don’t know what he has in mind.”
Chester, exhausted from his exertions, was content to sleep wrapped around Jubal’s neck as he climbed to the roof. It was covered in cats.
“Clear a path, Jubal,” Beulah told him. “I’m going to fly the shuttle out of the docking bay.”
But before she did, Sosi came scuttling out, looking very much like a cat who had swallowed a particularly tasty canary.
“What?” Jubal asked. He knew she was dying for him to ask.
She knelt down and stroked the coat of the nearest cat, who happened to be Bat. “Don’t worry, kitty. I called Daddy to come and get us. They were already entering orbit. They followed the tracking sensor in our shuttle.”
“But, Sosi, they’ll just make us give the cats back again,” Jubal said. “There’s no place we can go or way to hide them.”
Chester stretched and yawned, kneaded Jubal’s shoulder and said, Pshaw-Ra says he has a master plan. I think I believe him now.
Cats leaped over each other to escape the path of the shuttle Beulah was very carefully flying out of the open hatch. She hovered overhead. Cats scattered beneath her and she set the craft down beside the pyramid vessel.
In a moment more Beulah appeared at the shuttle’s hatch, calling, “Here, kitty kitty.” Some were reluctant, but most, raised on ships and having ridden in shuttles all of their lives until recently, were heartened by the familiar smells.
Hadley was the first one in, even though Sosi remained on the roof shooing cats toward the shuttle. Soon furry, whiskered faces were peering through all the viewports.
“I think we have a load now,” Beulah said.
Jubal glanced nervously at the door from the lower part of the building. Any minute now the security guard, at least, or maybe a whole squad of the Galactic goons, would come thundering up with weapons ready to recapture the cats and drag him, Sosi, and Beulah off to jail.
When he looked back at the shuttle, he saw that Beulah was no longer at its entrance and the shuttle was now several feet off the rooftop, ascending slowly at first, then more quickly.
Another shuttle swiftly replaced it. Captain Loloma himself stepped out onto the roof, narrowly avoiding crunching six tails and two sets of front paws beneath his boots.
“Daddy!” Sosi called, and hopped across cats, saying, “’Scuse me, kitty, ’scuse me, kitty,” causing furry pile-ups in her wake as the cats jumped on top of each other to escape her feet.
“Come on, kiddo. You too, Jubal. We’re going back to the Ranzo.”
“The kitties too, Dad?”
“He can’t take them, I’m afraid, Sosi,” Jubal told her, saying it before Captain Loloma had to say what he surely must. “He’ll get in trouble.”
But the captain surprised him. “I’ve been in trouble before, son,” he said. “How do you think I met your father? What they’ve tried to do to these animals is wrong. Beulah told me this entire epidemic scare was manufactured to enrich some politician’s family.”
Jubal started to ask how the captain intended for them to escape—where would he take the cats and his ship to be safe from the Galactic goons?
Pshaw-Ra stepped away from his vessel and the furry bodies packed inside. With his tawny tail waving majestically, he daintily stepped forward and looked up at Captain Loloma, fixing him with that brilliant golden gaze of his.
Chester sat up on Jubal’s shoulder and interpreted what the sand-colored cat seemed to be trying to laser directly into the captain’s brain. Pshaw-Ra needs you to tell the captain about his master plan, Chester told him.
The one for universal domination? Jubal asked.
The one where we